“Vin says the police don’t even believe she exists.”
“And you do?”
I shrugged. “The thing is, Rebecca, I keep seeing it this way. Suppose it was me who’d run out of that store. And suppose, crazy as it might sound to some people, I really wasn’t involved.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy to me.”
I wanted to kiss her right then. “Suppose I ran because I was scared, just like Vin says he was. And suppose I really found that money the way Vin says he did—”
“What money?”
I told her about the cash the cops had found on Vin. She didn’t say anything.
“Suppose it was me instead of Vin,” I said. “Suppose, sure, I’d been stupid, but that I hadn’t done anything wrong. But suppose it looked really bad for me. And suppose no one believed me. I’d need a friend, right? Someone who could help me.”
“I’d help you,” she said.
I didn’t doubt it for a minute. I stared into her brown eyes.
“For Vin, I’m the one,” I said. “Maybe things have been lousy between Vin and me lately, but he’s my friend.” It kept coming back to that. I kept thinking it and saying it, so it had to be true. “And I’m the only person who’s willing to help him.”
“By finding this girl?”
I nodded.
“Did you tell Mr. Riel?”
“About the girl? Yeah. He doesn’t believe it, either.” “Did you tell him you were going to help Vin?”
I shook my head. I didn’t tell her the rest of it, about the cops pressuring me and Riel telling me to keep clear of Vin.
The warning bell rang. Rebecca looked up at the school doors.
“I have band practice at lunchtime,” she said. She played the saxophone, and she’d stuck to it long enough that she’d aced the tryouts. I played sax, too, but not very well, for sure not well enough to make band. I was beginning to think that music wasn’t my thing. I hadn’t figured out yet what was. “Meet me after school,” she said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“We will?” I was definitely having hearing problems today. “You mean, as in you and me?”
“As in you and I,” she said, smiling. She went up on tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek, right there in front of the school.
CHAPTER SIX
“I had an idea,” Rebecca said when she met me at my locker after school. “We were playing volleyball in gym when it hit me.”
“Maybe you should have ducked,” I said. I crammed some books into my locker, took some other books out, and jammed them into my backpack.
“I’m serious,” Rebecca said as we headed for the stairs so that she could go to her locker, but she didn’t tell me right away what her idea was because by then we were on the second-floor landing and Sal was standing there. He turned away as soon as he saw me and hurried past us.
“Hi, Sal,” Rebecca said, her voice sweet and friendly, like always.
Sal turned back. “Hi, Rebecca,” he said, focusing hard on her so he wouldn’t have to look at me. Then he spun around and practically ran all the way down the stairs.
“You want to go after him and try to talk to him?” Rebecca said, watching him.
I shook my head. “He’s probably on his way to work. I’ll catch up with him later, when he has more time.” Rebecca didn’t say anything, but I bet she saw right through me. She always gave me that feeling. “So, what was your idea?” I said.
The way Rebecca figured it, if the girl Vin said he saw in the store had been where Vin said she was, in the storeroom, and if she didn’t work at the store—and we knew she didn’t because the cops had said the man and his wife ran the place alone—then that was, as she put it, “significant.”
“Let’s agree that ordinary customers don’t usually go into a store’s back room,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“So that means that if we’re going to assume that the girl was really there—”
If we’re going to assume.
“—then she wasn’t an ordinary customer. She must have known the people who ran the store. And if she knew the people well enough that they let her go in the storeroom, then maybe we can also assume that she’s been in the store more than once. Makes sense, right?”
“Okay,” I said. I wondered where she was going with this.
“So, let’s assume that she has been in the store before. And then let’s assume that if that’s true, maybe someone else saw her in the store at some point. Maybe they remember her. From the way Vin described her, she sounds like the kind of person you’d remember.”
“So what we have to do—”
“Is make like cops. Ask around. See what we can find out.” She smiled at me. “Come on. Are we going or what?”
There was that word again. We.
You’d think it would be easy enough—you walk up to a person, or several people, you describe a girl, and you ask that person or those people if they’ve ever seen her.
Well, if that’s what you think, you should try it. Go up to the guy who’s behind the register at the gas station that’s kitty-corner to the convenience store where the woman and the man got shot and say, “Excuse me, but I’m looking for a girl.” Describe the girl and ask him, “Have you seen her?” Check out the way the guy, who at first looked bored, now starts to look suspicious. Check out the way his eyes narrow. Check out the way he says, “What if I have?”
Rebecca and I went to the gas station first because it was the only place around that wasn’t either a house or a low-rise apartment building. The convenience store was a couple of blocks north of Danforth on the corner of a street in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It was the place where all the people in all the houses and apartment buildings around it would go if they’d suddenly run out of milk or cigarettes or if their kids wanted a candy bar or a bag of chips. There was a gas station on the corner diagonally opposite, and that was the sum total of the businesses in the immediate area.
The other reason Rebecca and I went to the gas station first was that we figured there was always someone there—either the guy who was standing behind the register now or whoever replaced him when he went home. We thought the guy behind the register might be the kind of person who took an interest in what went on around him. At least, we thought that before we went into the gas station.
As soon as we got inside, I knew we were wrong. This wasn’t one of those gas stations that have stores in them, you know, the way some of them sell snacks and juice and pop and cigarettes. Some of them even have a Tim’s inside that sells coffee and doughnuts and soup and sandwiches. Instead it was a cramped, square room attached to a garage where, I guess, there was a mechanic who did repairs. In the tiny room was a counter behind which was jammed a bored-looking guy and two TV monitors. One monitor showed the gas pumps, so the guy could see what was going on out there. The other was tuned to a talk show, but with the sound turned way down. The guy behind the counter wasn’t looking at either monitor. He was reading a newspaper, the one that always ran pictures of girls in bikinis. Even though a bell rang over the door when we opened it, he didn’t look up. He kept right on reading. Yeah, this was a guy who took a real interest in what went on around him.
Once we were inside, I didn’t see any point in talking to him. But Rebecca said, “Excuse me,” and the guy looked up. Rebecca gave me a look that said, Well, go on. So I described to him the girl that Vin had described to me and asked if he had seen her.
I was rewarded by the guy’s totally bored look. And his genius question, “What if I have?”
“Well, we’re looking for her,” Rebecca said.
The guy seemed to like that Rebecca had answered. It gave him an excuse to focus on her and ignore me. In fact, he seemed to enjoy looking at her, and I couldn’t blame him. She’s really pretty. But I didn’t like the way he was staring at her.
“Why?” he said.
“Why are we looking for her?” Rebecca smiled at the guy, probably to softe
n him up. “She’s a friend of a friend. We heard she lives around here. We thought maybe she could help us with something.”
It sounded pretty lame, but the guy behind the counter didn’t seem to mind. If you ask me, he was thinking up things Rebecca could help him with.
“So, have you seen her?” Rebecca said.
“No,” the guy said.
“You’re sure?” Rebecca said. She described the girl again.
The guy shook his head. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said to Rebecca, “what’s your name?”
“Thank you for your time,” Rebecca said. She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the place. “What a creep,” she muttered when we were outside again.
“Yeah. And he was probably our best shot. I mean, he just sits there all day, every day.”
Rebecca looked around. There were houses up and down the street in two different directions: north–south and east–west. Kids were playing outside in front of some of them. There were a few grown-ups outside, too, most of them women, most of them with their eyes zeroed in on little kids. An old man came down the street with a dog on a leash. It was one of those small dogs that looks like a barrel on legs and has a pushed-in face. The man turned up the front walk of a house a couple of doors away from the convenience store. He tied the dog’s leash to the porch railing and then sat on the porch steps, easing himself down like it hurt every inch of the way.
“Come on,” Rebecca said. She started for the old guy’s house.
“Hey,” I said. I had to run to catch her because she had broken away from me so suddenly and was moving so fast. “Where are you going?”
“People with dogs are out at least twice a day walking them,” she said. “Old guys with dogs, they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re always out, especially in nice weather like this. They see everything.”
Right.
When we’d first gotten there, Rebecca had been cranked about the gas station. Gas stations are open long hours, she’d said. People who work in gas stations see all kinds of things that regular people don’t see.
Uh-huh.
She crossed the street and sauntered up the old man’s walk.
“Hello,” she said.
The old man looked at her. He didn’t get up, but he did smile. Guys always smile at Rebecca. It doesn’t matter how old they are.
“You selling something?” he said. “Because if you are, I have to warn you, I’m not a soft touch. Well, unless you’re selling Girl Guide cookies. I sure do like those. The vanilla ones in particular. I keep telling them, sell boxes of just vanilla instead of those mixed boxes of chocolate and vanilla, and I’d buy a gross.”
“If they’re gross, why would he buy them?” I whispered to Rebecca.
“A gross is twelve dozen,” she said quietly.
Who knew?
“But I don’t suppose you’re a Girl Guide,” the old man said. “And I don’t suppose you’re selling Girl Guide cookies, are you?” He glanced at me when he said that. His expression wasn’t nearly as friendly when he looked me over as it had been when he’d checked out Rebecca.
“We’re not selling anything,” Rebecca said. “We’re looking for someone.”
The old guy peered a little harder at Rebecca now. “There’s a lot of people looking for someone around here,” he said. “There was a woman shot and killed here just last week, and her husband is in the hospital. He was shot, too. I heard he’s in rough shape.”
“That’s terrible,” Rebecca said. When I started to say something—“We know.”—she squeezed my hand. I got the message.
“The police were around,” the old man said. “They said it was three young fellows who did it. They said they know who one of them is and that they’re looking for the other two.” He looked sharply at me.
“We’re not looking for a guy,” Rebecca said. “We’re looking for a girl.” The man shifted his eyes back to her. “We found this wallet in the little park down the street,” she said. She pulled a brown-and-tan leather wallet from her purse. I knew for a fact that it was hers. “There was a little kid in the park. He was pretty sure he saw the girl who might have dropped it. But there’s no name in it and no ID. Just twenty-five dollars. Since she dropped it in the park right near here, we thought maybe she lived around here.”
She looked so sincere. That’s probably because she’s an honest person—well, apart from the occasional little white lie, like the one she was telling right now. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s so pretty. It was making it easy for the old man to want to believe her. In fact, he looked impressed. He was probably one of those people who think that kids are nothing but trouble, so he was probably surprised that here were a couple of kids who were trying to do the right thing.
“What does this girl look like?” he said.
Rebecca was hitting it off so well with the old guy that I decided to let her do all the talking. She gave him the description that Vin had given me.
“Spiky black hair?” the old man echoed. “The black I get. But the spiky part—didn’t that go out a few years ago?”
“Mostly,” Rebecca agreed. “But some people just go with whatever they like or whatever they think makes the statement they’re trying to make.”
“Tell me,” the old guy said, “when a nice-looking girl puts a ring through her eyebrow, what kind of statement is she trying to make?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure,” Rebecca said after thinking for a moment. “Maybe she’s saying, I can handle the pain. You know, maybe she’s saying she’s tough.”
The old guy nodded. “You could be right,” he said. “Anyway, it fits.”
It fits? What did that mean?
Rebecca must have been wondering the same thing, because she turned her head and gave me a warning look, like I should keep my mouth shut and let her go with the flow.
“So you’ve seen her around?” she said to the old man. “You’ve seen the girl that the boy in the park described to us?”
“I’ve seen her,” the old man said. “But if you ask me, it would be justice if you kept that wallet.”
Rebecca waited. I was dying to ask the old man what he meant, but Rebecca was patient.
“She was in the store,” he said, “the one I was telling you about, where the woman and her husband got shot. Cecilia Lee, that was the woman’s name. A really nice woman. A lot younger than her husband. I heard they met through one of those international dating services. She came here from China especially to marry him.”
That surprised me. The newspaper hadn’t included any of those details, just the main facts.
“She was a hard worker, too,” the old man said. “They both were. They kept that store open seven days a week, six in the morning until midnight. It’s tough for little places like that to keep afloat. They’re up against the big guys that are open twenty-four hours a day. It was different when the big grocery stores used to close at six or nine at night and didn’t even open on Sunday. And then there’s places like 7–Eleven.” He shook his head. “Fifteen or twenty years ago, there were corner stores every couple of blocks around here, and people went regularly to the one closest to their house. But not anymore. Now they’re closing one by one. Lots of the neighborhood places just fold, and then people buy them and convert them into regular houses.”
Rebecca nodded. She had a serious expression on her face, like she was listening closely to every word.
“The girl you described,” he said. “She was in the store, oh, three, maybe four months ago. I was in there buying milk for my coffee, and right away, as soon as I went through the door, I saw her. You couldn’t miss her, with that spiky hair and that hardware through her eyebrow. And you know what she was doing in there?”
Rebecca shook her head.
“Treating herself to a five-finger discount.”
It took me a couple of seconds to get what he meant. She’d been shoplifting.
“What’s the matter with kids, anyway?” the old man said. “They see
something, they just take it, like it was free, like someone didn’t have to pay for it in the first place. Well, I grabbed her good, let me tell you. To a young lady like you, I may look like I’m over the hill, but I still have a few good muscles and some pretty good reflexes. I grabbed her, and I told Mrs. Lee she’d better call the police.” He shook his head again. “But she didn’t.”
“She let the girl go?” Rebecca said.
“For all I know,” the old man said. “I told her to call the police, but she just shook her head and said she would take care of it.”
“What did she do?”
The old man shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I argued with her about it—it really got to me how the girl just smirked when Mrs. Lee said she didn’t want to call the police. Then I left the store.” He thought a moment. “The girl didn’t take off right away, like you’d expect. I don’t know what happened after that. I watched a while from my window, you know, to make sure everything was okay, but I never saw the girl come out of the store. Maybe she left when I turned away for a minute, I don’t know. Tell you what, though. Her husband was angry when he found out.”
“He was there, too?” Rebecca said.
The old man shook his head. “I mentioned it to him the next time I was in the store. He got pretty angry. He would have called the police for sure. Yes sir, he would have taught that girl a lesson.”
“So,” Rebecca said slowly, “I guess you don’t know if she lives around here?”
“Maybe she does,” the old man said. “But I doubt it. Ticker and I are out and about every day.” Ticker must have been the little barrel with legs that was leashed to the porch railing. “I bet we know pretty much everyone in the area. But I only ever saw the girl that one time.”
Rebecca thanked the old man for his time and flashed him a big, sincere thank-you smile. The old man didn’t even look at me, which was good. It saved me having to pretend something I didn’t feel.
“So, that was good,” Rebecca said as we walked away.
“Right,” I said. “That was really productive.” I was being sarcastic.
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